Hey Ray !
First of all, welcome to the forum and our continuing software nightmare.
Any and all suggestions are much welcomed and encouraged. You have excellent ideas, and there is always room for hardware improvement in this project. Basically, with the right software, (already proven to work) the hardware functions just about flawless. I've just got home from talking with my neighbor, who understands our problem now with too many pulses coming from the pic in in the below 200 rpm, engine not yet running mode of the software. It seems that a wrong bit is being set in one of the registers. Finding out which one and why it's doing this is our present concern. Once we locate the conditions causing the random bit setting, the few lines of code requiring the change will be put into the source code and recompiled for testing. He is looking at it right now to see where it is. He said he'll email the edits to me so I can post it here.

I want to make use of your suggestions for the SCR gate overvoltage protection, since is a great idea and only one part easily soldered in place. Every idea is worth a look. I'm taking your 2 cents and investing it!

Thanks again for your input Ray, much appreciated!

John